Recent studies and articles in the popular media have reported that regular exercise is beneficial to health and longevity. As a result, membership gyms have become very popular among those seeking an exercise regimen. However, it is often difficult to maintain a regular exercise routine when visits to a gym are inconvenient or impossible, due to, for example, traveling or working. Thus, it is desired to be able to exercise in the convenience of one's home, office, temporary workplace, hotel room, etc., using a lightweight and portable exercise apparatus that can be stored and transported readily.
One of the best forms of exercise to improve muscle tone and strength, as well as to increase overall fitness, is isometric weight training, in which the exerciser may use his or her own body weight as resistance against muscular movement. For example, a number of common upper-body and abdominal exercises utilize isometric resistance, including dips and push-ups for upper-body muscular development, and leg or knee raises for abdominal muscles.
Isometric exercise apparatus are generally advantageous in that they do not necessitate the implementation of moving parts or supplemental weights for their utility, or a second person to spot the user. However, isometric exercise apparatus are nevertheless typically quite heavy and bulky, and are usually not portable. In addition, these apparatus are commonly incorporated into expensive multi-station gyms, which occupy a substantial area of floor space. Accordingly, such exercise devices are often ill suited to home or office use because of their bulk and their non-portability.
Prior attempts to provide portable exercise apparatus have largely failed to solve the aforementioned problems, due to a variety of reasons. Such known apparatus have often been highly specialized and limited to one orientation, thereby permitting the exercise of only a single discrete portion of an individual's anatomy. For example, apparatus consisting of fixed, high-mounted horizontal parallel bars allow the user to perform traditional full-body dips and leg or knee raises, but do not facilitate other varieties of dip exercises which isolate certain muscle groups (such as "tricep dips," where a user performs dips with his/her arms behind the back, while maintaining the back of his/her heels on the floor) or multiple variations of push-ups of any kind. Another prior art example is the simple push-up bar which does not allow the user to perform full-body dips or knee raises to exercise his/her abdominal muscles. In addition, the portability of some prior art apparatus has required the assembly/disassembly of numerous component parts, use of tools making the devices difficult and time-consuming to use. Further, many of the portable exercise devices in the prior art have lacked sufficient stability or sturdiness.